The Armenian Genocide: Prof Vahakn Dadrian's Lecture at Harvard
Vahakn Dadrian, Ph.D.
Harvard University
April 24, 2001
I would like to discuss the significance of the Armenian Genocide in the light of Turkish denials. The Armenian Genocide has many significant characteristics, such as, that they were victimized in their own ancestral territories, that religion was a powerful instrument in inciting the masses, even though the perpetrators, the arch perpetrators, were themselves mostly either atheistic or agnostic.
The Armenian Genocide is also significant by the fact that there was massive, popular participation in the atrocities. It was also significant by the fact that, to quote Ambassador Morganthau, "to save shell and powder," the perpetrators deliberately used blunt instruments, thereby protracting the agony of dying of the victims. This should never be lost of sight, in terms of the very significant nature of the Armenian Genocide: protracted agonies in dying, because of the decision of the perpetrators to avoid bullets and use instead blunt instruments.
And then, of course, the major feature of the Armenian Genocide, which deserves focal attention: the persistent denial of what Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915."
This denial imparts to the Armenian Genocide extraordinary significance, not only for the Armenians themselves but also in terms of subsequent perpetrators that appeared on the horizon since World War I.
Because the denial is a function of impunity, people who escape punishment become defiant, become very bold in terms of rationalizing the crime, and most importantly, they embolden, by way of political contagion, other potential perpetrators.
Therefore, the denial of the Armenian Genocide requires special attention as it terribly encumbers the problem of documentation. Deniers are wont to withhold evidence; deniers are wont to destroy evidence. Therefore, a scholar of the Armenian Genocide has to be by necessity not only a scholar but also a detective.
Holocaust scholars are besieged - saturated - with overwhelming evidence because of the German, Teutonic passion for recordkeeping. That condition is totally absent in the case of the Armenian Genocide. Specifically, the denial syndrome has three major elements: the denial of the crime, the denial of the victim, and even the denial of third parties to pass or to render a judgment on it.
Therefore, let me briefly outline the specific elements of denial, because, before a crime of such magnitude as the Armenian Genocide can be documented, you have to confront and overcome the specific elements of the denial.
The Turks - past and present - deny that the Armenians were subjected to massacres, but rather they were subjected to deportation. Number two, the point is made that not all Armenians of the Ottoman Empire but only a segment of the Armenian population, specifically in the war zones in the eastern provinces, were subjected to deportation. Number three, the Armenians provoked the authorities to take drastic, draconian measures that ended in tragedy, but that the provocation came from the Armenian side.
Then there is the argument that if atrocities took place, they were reciprocal. Armenians killed Turks; Turks killed Armenians. And finally, I think the most overwhelming aspect of Turkish denial that deserves specifically confrontation and debunking is the argument of "civil war."
Because of brevity of time, I cannot deal with all the specifics of this denial. But I will focus very briefly on the argument of "civil war," because it is persistent and paramount. Even today, during dinner, one of the Armenian students in the business school at Harvard was telling me that a Turkish student, as fresh as recently, told her that the Armenian Genocide is not reality because what happened was simply a "civil war."
So this argument is being broadcast throughout the world by Turkish agents, by the Turkish ambassadors, by the Turkish consuls, and some very gullible third parties that are not informed about the case have absorbed this argument of "civil war."
By any definition, "civil war" means the collapse of central authority, and the subsequent onset of a vacuum. As a result, factions begin to fight one another in the absence of central authority. Let's examine whether this was the case in World War I affecting the Ottoman Empire.
Let me briefly describe what the authorities did before the Genocide was enacted. First and foremost, this is one of the basic conditions of the Armenian Genocide: Several months before embarking upon the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turk Ottoman authorities dissolved the Ottoman parliament. Talaat Pasha in his subsequent post-war memoirs indicates that he didn't want any argumentation or discussion in his own parliament as some humanitarian Turks might have objected; he wanted total freedom and control. And this is an exact replica of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust was initiated, the Reichstag was destroyed and the entire authority was transferred to the executive branch of the government.
Secondly, the Turks declared martial law. You know what martial law is: total control of movement, censorship, isolating provinces from one another, total control of communication, and the threat of swift and severe military punishment. And then, of course, the secret service was mobilized.
In other words, the Ottoman authorities not only were in full control, but they also had concentrated power in their hands to run the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. But I think that the most significant feature of the futility of the argument of "civil war" is this fact: On August 2, 1914, three days before World War I broke out, the Ottoman authorities declared general mobilization, as a result of which all Armenians, citizens of Turkey, in the age category of 20 to 45, were conscripted into the Ottoman army.
You can imagine the agony, the petrified feelings of the remaining Armenian population, which consisted of old men, children, and women - very much aware of the fresh massacres of 1909 in Adana and still remembering the harrowing massacres of 1894-96. There was terror in the population, and to think that this collection of old men, women, and children would even dare to think to confront the Ottoman army, to confront fully armed Muslims throughout the empire.
Where is going to come the logistics? Where is going to come the weaponry? Where is going to come the command and control system of this terror-stricken population whose main concern was how to survive the war?
The frivolity of the argument of "civil war" is exceeded only by its absurdity. And even today, some enlightened Turkish historians are advising their colleagues not to use this argument, because not only is it absurd, it undermines the Turkish position. Any application of simple logic will demolish this argument.
Let me now point out that, if denial is persistent, if denial is truculent, what is to be done to overcome the problem in terms of documentation. Any documentation has to be adjusted to the specifics of the problem at hand. I submit to you that the documentation of the Armenian Genocide in the light of this persistent denial requires specific methodology. It cannot be simple documentation. It has to be documentation of a special kind that overwhelms the deniers.
And I call this, in my definition, "compelling evidence." Not simple evidence but compelling evidence is needed.
What are the specific elements of compelling evidence? There are four of them. Number one: The evidence has to be reliable. By this I mean that the source has to be more or less unimpeachable. For instance, to illustrate the point: American Consul Leslie Davis from Kharpert is graphically describing the atrocities in Kharpert province; he had taken a Turk to be a guide to him, and it was this Moslem Turk who showed all the spots, all the sites of atrocities while providing graphic details. To me, this is reliable. I would be skeptical if his guide and informant were an Armenian. But here is authentic Turkish evidence supplied to an American consul. That I consider adequately reliable.
The second element in my definition of compelling evidence is what I call "explicitness." Was it deportation? Or was it the destruction of the deportee population? My research suggests categorically that the deportation was a cover to enact the intended goal of deportation, which was the destruction of the deportee population.
The third element in my definition of compelling evidence is "incontestability." I think incontestability applies largely to official documents, and I will briefly explain to you German, Austrian, official Turkish documents which attach extraordinary significance to the evidence in terms of incontestability.
And finally, in my definition of compelling evidence, the fourth element is "verifiability." If I make a point and suggest a reference, a document, anybody should be able to go to the source of that document, verify its existence and its content. That is called verifiability.
Therefore, the overcoming of the Turkish denial requires compelling evidence in terms of these four elements I just described.
So the question arises, given the present conditions, what are the avenues by which compelling evidence can be located, secured, and obtained? I use a methodology for this purpose, which I call the "exclusion/inclusion polarity."
In other words, I exclude from my research all evidence, all data that may be one way or another associated with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. By this definition, I avoid if I can, documents emanating from British archives, from French archives, and from Russian archives. All these three countries were enemies of the Ottoman Empire.
Not that they are devoid of any value. On the contrary - specifically British archives - are full of authentic documentation, but because they are emanating from the enemies of the Ottoman Empire, they invite doubt and they entitle the Turks to inject an element of doubt, saying that this can be enemy propaganda.
The same applies, to some extent, to what I call "Armenian survivor accounts." Here again, some Armenian survivor accounts, specifically in the period of 1920s, 30s, and 40s have powerful material of documentation that is firsthand, fresh in the aftermath of the Genocide. Not these recent surveys of 80-, 90-year-old Armenians, whose memories are dim, who tend to mix reality with fantasy, embellish, become hostage to selective memory, et cetera.
None of these conditions are present in this massive volume of Armenian survivor accounts that is still awaiting exploration by way of translation and analysis. Some day, when there is a vibrant and viable Armenian republic with a resource-rich academy, young Armenian scholars will focus more on this data and less on the survivor accounts of the last two decades.
So, I exclude from my research Armenian survivor accounts as well - again, not that I am intent on diminishing their value, but to deny the deniers the argument that this is "victim bias." It is true, more often than not, victims are prone to bias. This is a universal condition.
So what is left after this exclusionary procedure; What can I include, to produce compelling evidence? I have two classes of documentation which, I believe, meet this condition. One of them is the archives of the allies of Ottoman Empire during World War I: Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary. I have been to the German archives in Bonn 18 times in the last 20 years, and I have hundreds and hundreds of German documents, detailing graphically, day in and day out, the atrocities taking place in the interior of Turkey during World War I, produced by German officials: consuls, vice consuls, military officers, et cetera. And the same with Austria-Hungary.
It is inconceivable that a military and political ally, during the war, would try, would venture to discredit another ally. It is inconceivable. On the contrary, German and Austrian officials went out of their way - for a long time after the Genocide was initiated - to protect the reputation of Turkey. They expressed doubts concerning the truth about massacres, until it dawned on them by massive evidence, beginning in June and July, that this was not an ordinary initiative of massive deportation.
And when you read the German documents again and again, the single word used by ambassador after ambassador is the German word Ausrottung, which means purely and plainly "extermination."
But most importantly, why I think that German and Austrian documents are more than compelling evidence is this fact: They were not intended for public consumption. They were wartime reports meant to be used by the superiors of these officers for what is called "in-house use," internal use.
This fact immensely amplifies the significance of the authenticity of these documents, which were not meant for public consumption: Subordinate officers informing their superiors about the facts, which was their assigned duty to do, namely, to report as to what is transpiring in their districts.
The second class of categories I use are authentic Turkish documents. Here is a paradox: On the one hand I am saying that Turks are denying that they are withholding documents, they have destroyed documents, which are true. How can you then explain the existence of valid Turkish-Ottoman documents?
Well, the fact is that no matter how meticulous you are, no matter how careful you are, for a crime of such gigantic dimensions as the Armenian Genocide was, it is practically impossible to destroy every bit of evidence. Almost invariably, some documents survive. And these are the documents I propose and I do use in my research.
What kind of documents are they? There are three such sub-classes of surviving Ottoman documents. Number one, that has been discussed briefly previously by Professor Bardakjian, the documents of the Turkish military tribunal. When Turkey at the end of October 1918 laid prostrate and asked for a suspension of hostilities, the victorious allies - France, Britain, and Italy - stipulated, among others, a condition to postwar Turkish authorities.
They said, "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh." In part, to accommodate the victorious allies, successive postwar Turkish governments established court martials in Istanbul, Turkey.
Attached to these court martials was an inquiry commission, which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena, arrest, et cetera. So this was called the Mazhar Inquiry Commission. For about seven weeks, Mazhar Inquiry Commission secured from many provinces of Ottoman Turkey authentic, official Ottoman documents.
From Ankara province alone, they acquired 42 documents, which mainly involved correspondence between two military commanders. One of them, Colonel Recayi, was the acting commander of the Fifth Army Corps stationed in Ankara, and the other, Colonel Sahabeddin, the acting commander of the 15th division in Kayseri. The correspondence mainly involved regular accounts of the process of liquidation of the province's Armenians.
I give you an example: The military commander of Bogazliyan, a district in Ankara province, sends a cipher telegram to his superior in Ankara, Colonel Recayi. He says, "Today we dispatched so many Armenians to their destination." In Turkish, Müretteblerine Sevk.
Vahakn Dadrian, Ph.D.
Harvard University
April 24, 2001
I would like to discuss the significance of the Armenian Genocide in the light of Turkish denials. The Armenian Genocide has many significant characteristics, such as, that they were victimized in their own ancestral territories, that religion was a powerful instrument in inciting the masses, even though the perpetrators, the arch perpetrators, were themselves mostly either atheistic or agnostic.
The Armenian Genocide is also significant by the fact that there was massive, popular participation in the atrocities. It was also significant by the fact that, to quote Ambassador Morganthau, "to save shell and powder," the perpetrators deliberately used blunt instruments, thereby protracting the agony of dying of the victims. This should never be lost of sight, in terms of the very significant nature of the Armenian Genocide: protracted agonies in dying, because of the decision of the perpetrators to avoid bullets and use instead blunt instruments.
And then, of course, the major feature of the Armenian Genocide, which deserves focal attention: the persistent denial of what Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915."
This denial imparts to the Armenian Genocide extraordinary significance, not only for the Armenians themselves but also in terms of subsequent perpetrators that appeared on the horizon since World War I.
Because the denial is a function of impunity, people who escape punishment become defiant, become very bold in terms of rationalizing the crime, and most importantly, they embolden, by way of political contagion, other potential perpetrators.
Therefore, the denial of the Armenian Genocide requires special attention as it terribly encumbers the problem of documentation. Deniers are wont to withhold evidence; deniers are wont to destroy evidence. Therefore, a scholar of the Armenian Genocide has to be by necessity not only a scholar but also a detective.
Holocaust scholars are besieged - saturated - with overwhelming evidence because of the German, Teutonic passion for recordkeeping. That condition is totally absent in the case of the Armenian Genocide. Specifically, the denial syndrome has three major elements: the denial of the crime, the denial of the victim, and even the denial of third parties to pass or to render a judgment on it.
Therefore, let me briefly outline the specific elements of denial, because, before a crime of such magnitude as the Armenian Genocide can be documented, you have to confront and overcome the specific elements of the denial.
The Turks - past and present - deny that the Armenians were subjected to massacres, but rather they were subjected to deportation. Number two, the point is made that not all Armenians of the Ottoman Empire but only a segment of the Armenian population, specifically in the war zones in the eastern provinces, were subjected to deportation. Number three, the Armenians provoked the authorities to take drastic, draconian measures that ended in tragedy, but that the provocation came from the Armenian side.
Then there is the argument that if atrocities took place, they were reciprocal. Armenians killed Turks; Turks killed Armenians. And finally, I think the most overwhelming aspect of Turkish denial that deserves specifically confrontation and debunking is the argument of "civil war."
Because of brevity of time, I cannot deal with all the specifics of this denial. But I will focus very briefly on the argument of "civil war," because it is persistent and paramount. Even today, during dinner, one of the Armenian students in the business school at Harvard was telling me that a Turkish student, as fresh as recently, told her that the Armenian Genocide is not reality because what happened was simply a "civil war."
So this argument is being broadcast throughout the world by Turkish agents, by the Turkish ambassadors, by the Turkish consuls, and some very gullible third parties that are not informed about the case have absorbed this argument of "civil war."
By any definition, "civil war" means the collapse of central authority, and the subsequent onset of a vacuum. As a result, factions begin to fight one another in the absence of central authority. Let's examine whether this was the case in World War I affecting the Ottoman Empire.
Let me briefly describe what the authorities did before the Genocide was enacted. First and foremost, this is one of the basic conditions of the Armenian Genocide: Several months before embarking upon the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turk Ottoman authorities dissolved the Ottoman parliament. Talaat Pasha in his subsequent post-war memoirs indicates that he didn't want any argumentation or discussion in his own parliament as some humanitarian Turks might have objected; he wanted total freedom and control. And this is an exact replica of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust was initiated, the Reichstag was destroyed and the entire authority was transferred to the executive branch of the government.
Secondly, the Turks declared martial law. You know what martial law is: total control of movement, censorship, isolating provinces from one another, total control of communication, and the threat of swift and severe military punishment. And then, of course, the secret service was mobilized.
In other words, the Ottoman authorities not only were in full control, but they also had concentrated power in their hands to run the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. But I think that the most significant feature of the futility of the argument of "civil war" is this fact: On August 2, 1914, three days before World War I broke out, the Ottoman authorities declared general mobilization, as a result of which all Armenians, citizens of Turkey, in the age category of 20 to 45, were conscripted into the Ottoman army.
You can imagine the agony, the petrified feelings of the remaining Armenian population, which consisted of old men, children, and women - very much aware of the fresh massacres of 1909 in Adana and still remembering the harrowing massacres of 1894-96. There was terror in the population, and to think that this collection of old men, women, and children would even dare to think to confront the Ottoman army, to confront fully armed Muslims throughout the empire.
Where is going to come the logistics? Where is going to come the weaponry? Where is going to come the command and control system of this terror-stricken population whose main concern was how to survive the war?
The frivolity of the argument of "civil war" is exceeded only by its absurdity. And even today, some enlightened Turkish historians are advising their colleagues not to use this argument, because not only is it absurd, it undermines the Turkish position. Any application of simple logic will demolish this argument.
Let me now point out that, if denial is persistent, if denial is truculent, what is to be done to overcome the problem in terms of documentation. Any documentation has to be adjusted to the specifics of the problem at hand. I submit to you that the documentation of the Armenian Genocide in the light of this persistent denial requires specific methodology. It cannot be simple documentation. It has to be documentation of a special kind that overwhelms the deniers.
And I call this, in my definition, "compelling evidence." Not simple evidence but compelling evidence is needed.
What are the specific elements of compelling evidence? There are four of them. Number one: The evidence has to be reliable. By this I mean that the source has to be more or less unimpeachable. For instance, to illustrate the point: American Consul Leslie Davis from Kharpert is graphically describing the atrocities in Kharpert province; he had taken a Turk to be a guide to him, and it was this Moslem Turk who showed all the spots, all the sites of atrocities while providing graphic details. To me, this is reliable. I would be skeptical if his guide and informant were an Armenian. But here is authentic Turkish evidence supplied to an American consul. That I consider adequately reliable.
The second element in my definition of compelling evidence is what I call "explicitness." Was it deportation? Or was it the destruction of the deportee population? My research suggests categorically that the deportation was a cover to enact the intended goal of deportation, which was the destruction of the deportee population.
The third element in my definition of compelling evidence is "incontestability." I think incontestability applies largely to official documents, and I will briefly explain to you German, Austrian, official Turkish documents which attach extraordinary significance to the evidence in terms of incontestability.
And finally, in my definition of compelling evidence, the fourth element is "verifiability." If I make a point and suggest a reference, a document, anybody should be able to go to the source of that document, verify its existence and its content. That is called verifiability.
Therefore, the overcoming of the Turkish denial requires compelling evidence in terms of these four elements I just described.
So the question arises, given the present conditions, what are the avenues by which compelling evidence can be located, secured, and obtained? I use a methodology for this purpose, which I call the "exclusion/inclusion polarity."
In other words, I exclude from my research all evidence, all data that may be one way or another associated with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. By this definition, I avoid if I can, documents emanating from British archives, from French archives, and from Russian archives. All these three countries were enemies of the Ottoman Empire.
Not that they are devoid of any value. On the contrary - specifically British archives - are full of authentic documentation, but because they are emanating from the enemies of the Ottoman Empire, they invite doubt and they entitle the Turks to inject an element of doubt, saying that this can be enemy propaganda.
The same applies, to some extent, to what I call "Armenian survivor accounts." Here again, some Armenian survivor accounts, specifically in the period of 1920s, 30s, and 40s have powerful material of documentation that is firsthand, fresh in the aftermath of the Genocide. Not these recent surveys of 80-, 90-year-old Armenians, whose memories are dim, who tend to mix reality with fantasy, embellish, become hostage to selective memory, et cetera.
None of these conditions are present in this massive volume of Armenian survivor accounts that is still awaiting exploration by way of translation and analysis. Some day, when there is a vibrant and viable Armenian republic with a resource-rich academy, young Armenian scholars will focus more on this data and less on the survivor accounts of the last two decades.
So, I exclude from my research Armenian survivor accounts as well - again, not that I am intent on diminishing their value, but to deny the deniers the argument that this is "victim bias." It is true, more often than not, victims are prone to bias. This is a universal condition.
So what is left after this exclusionary procedure; What can I include, to produce compelling evidence? I have two classes of documentation which, I believe, meet this condition. One of them is the archives of the allies of Ottoman Empire during World War I: Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary. I have been to the German archives in Bonn 18 times in the last 20 years, and I have hundreds and hundreds of German documents, detailing graphically, day in and day out, the atrocities taking place in the interior of Turkey during World War I, produced by German officials: consuls, vice consuls, military officers, et cetera. And the same with Austria-Hungary.
It is inconceivable that a military and political ally, during the war, would try, would venture to discredit another ally. It is inconceivable. On the contrary, German and Austrian officials went out of their way - for a long time after the Genocide was initiated - to protect the reputation of Turkey. They expressed doubts concerning the truth about massacres, until it dawned on them by massive evidence, beginning in June and July, that this was not an ordinary initiative of massive deportation.
And when you read the German documents again and again, the single word used by ambassador after ambassador is the German word Ausrottung, which means purely and plainly "extermination."
But most importantly, why I think that German and Austrian documents are more than compelling evidence is this fact: They were not intended for public consumption. They were wartime reports meant to be used by the superiors of these officers for what is called "in-house use," internal use.
This fact immensely amplifies the significance of the authenticity of these documents, which were not meant for public consumption: Subordinate officers informing their superiors about the facts, which was their assigned duty to do, namely, to report as to what is transpiring in their districts.
The second class of categories I use are authentic Turkish documents. Here is a paradox: On the one hand I am saying that Turks are denying that they are withholding documents, they have destroyed documents, which are true. How can you then explain the existence of valid Turkish-Ottoman documents?
Well, the fact is that no matter how meticulous you are, no matter how careful you are, for a crime of such gigantic dimensions as the Armenian Genocide was, it is practically impossible to destroy every bit of evidence. Almost invariably, some documents survive. And these are the documents I propose and I do use in my research.
What kind of documents are they? There are three such sub-classes of surviving Ottoman documents. Number one, that has been discussed briefly previously by Professor Bardakjian, the documents of the Turkish military tribunal. When Turkey at the end of October 1918 laid prostrate and asked for a suspension of hostilities, the victorious allies - France, Britain, and Italy - stipulated, among others, a condition to postwar Turkish authorities.
They said, "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh." In part, to accommodate the victorious allies, successive postwar Turkish governments established court martials in Istanbul, Turkey.
Attached to these court martials was an inquiry commission, which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena, arrest, et cetera. So this was called the Mazhar Inquiry Commission. For about seven weeks, Mazhar Inquiry Commission secured from many provinces of Ottoman Turkey authentic, official Ottoman documents.
From Ankara province alone, they acquired 42 documents, which mainly involved correspondence between two military commanders. One of them, Colonel Recayi, was the acting commander of the Fifth Army Corps stationed in Ankara, and the other, Colonel Sahabeddin, the acting commander of the 15th division in Kayseri. The correspondence mainly involved regular accounts of the process of liquidation of the province's Armenians.
I give you an example: The military commander of Bogazliyan, a district in Ankara province, sends a cipher telegram to his superior in Ankara, Colonel Recayi. He says, "Today we dispatched so many Armenians to their destination." In Turkish, Müretteblerine Sevk.
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